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Baltimore City Paper March 31 - April 6,
2004 Pairing Cold Steel Contraptions with Bits of Flash Fiction, Peter Stanfield Creates Machines With Feeling By J. Bowers It would be grossly
unfair to call Chicago artist Peter Stanfield a mixed-media sculptor and
stop at that. His aluminum, glass, and acrylic creations rely on his writing
ability as much as his artistic skill, combining hand-machined constructions
with carefully crafted short-short stories, aka flash fiction--a genre
that's been creating buzz in the publishing industry for the past 10 years
or so. In addition to having one foot planted firmly on his visual-art
background and the other dipped into the written word, Stanfield straddles
the ambiguous territory between physical objects and their inner, emotional
world. In an artist's statment, he says he is fascinated by the fact that
the English language uses the same word, "feel," to express
all sensations, both physical and emotional, and the complications that
stem from that idea form the philosophical backbone of his work. Visually, Stanfield's work is fairly uniform--raw aluminum and acrylic panels form futuristic-looking shadow boxes, illuminated from within by fluorescent light tubes. Vials and compartments full of brightly colored dye give each sculpture a disinfected, science-lab feel, magnified by the fat black electrical cords that spill down the gallery walls. The pieces' movable lenslike attachments stimulate the mind's natural tendency to anthropomorphize--it's hard to look at them without searching for faces, some sort of human mirror amid the metallic gleam. Usually, the sculptures resist such easy identification. Taken en masse, Stanfield's work can seem somewhat redundant--his skill at cutting, polishing, and assembling metal is almost robotically precise, resulting in objects that would seem right at home hanging from the walls of a high-tech medical lab. The individuality--and power--in Stanfield's work emerges from his writing, which inhabits the same quirky corner as the verses of U.K. writer/artist/Radiohead cover designer Stanley Donwood, or Richard Brautigan's charming prose poems, which present weird situations or characters with matter-of-fact, dry wit. "Displacement" pairs six vials of swimming-pool-blue dye sandwiched behind aquamarine acrylic panels with text explaining that "the best method for determining the volume of a complex three-dimensional form is to submerge it entirely in water and measure its displacement." The text goes on to describe a man diving into the ocean, "feeling the air bubbles peel away from his skin, leaving him surrounded by cool water," and thinking "how wonderful it is to be a physical body in a material world." Meanwhile, the power cord connecting the unlit textual portion of the sculpture to its larger, purely visual section makes the viewer feel as though the words might be measuring the displacement levels of the piece's dye-filled vials, or vice versa. "Second Moon in a Cup" contrasts industrial sterility with the natural world, submerging twigs in tiny boxes of mossy green dye. The effect is reminiscent of a fish tank or terrarium--the wood appears almost black against the filtered fluorescent light, earthy and enigmatic. Here, Stanfield's unnamed protagonist writes that "observing life indirectly can be so much more interesting than looking at it unobscured, like misunderstanding a conversation, hearing something fantastic in it, or thinking he saw someone he recognized ducking into a building where she shouldn't be." Next to the indirectly observed, hermetically sealed twigs, the text's relevance is obvious, yet elegant. "Technophile" seems to offer insight into how Stanfield views his machine-shop materials, using vials full of blue dye and a towerlike composition to illustrate a funny prose poem about a man who imbues a water tower with quasi-spiritual significance, desperate to cling to its "wart-like" rivets and "skin of steel." Stanfield's work is less arresting when he doesn't create a direct correlation between text and form. For instance, "Spin," which combines an abstract tale about a conversation with Albert Einstein with red cotton-balled glass vials, would make little sense on their own, without a room full of context to back it up. A similar disconnect occurs with "Taste," though the piece boasts the most engaging story in the exhibit. The sweetly idiosyncratic tale of a man who has lost his sense of taste (a semiautobiographical nod to Stanfield himself, who has no sense of smell) seems very much at odds with the sculpture's 16 vials full of blue dye. Perhaps Stanfield is commenting on the work itself, invoking the old adage that "taste is the enemy of art," or counting on the sharp contrast between his story's tactile, very human sensuality and his sculpture's cold inaccessibility. Either way, the immediate presence of other, more directly interrelated pieces is invaluable in making Semitransparent work as a whole. Ranged around the gallery, the individual sculptures seem to silently communicate with one another, like components in a vast and mysterious machine. Given that human beings are, in many ways, exactly that--just fleshy collections of electrical, mechanical, and chemical systems--Stanfield might be on the right track.
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